In recent years, many companies becoming a market-driven; Meanwhile, customers getting more intelligent and your competitors always try to “catch your customers”. So that brings: doing a business in this international competitive environment is a deep challenge. In order to improve your performance, keep existing customers and explore the new market; have to start adapting the new environment.
Of course, every companies “Do more with less!”. For this purpose, companies’ enterprise has a complete picture of data, presented in a way that is meaningful to summary, and detail analysis that is crucial to making confident decisions.
To make confident decision, decision-makers need to have enough data and information. The amount of information grows it becomes a problem to get “the right one at the right place for the right people” (3R). As need of each business units focuses on providing users the information they needed to do business and units encouraged in building independent applications. Finance department has Intacct, marketing&sales department SalesForce, account managers an excel spreadsheets, HR department cloud system etc. For instance, how can that each business units share the data, how can that each customer will discontinue the service be estimated to target the group of customers and thus reduce churning and optimize customer retention? Without the support of advanced model of strategy and data mining technique, it would be arduous to derive a reliable estimate of the churn probability and to determine the best recipients of specific marketing strategy.
The research paper “Market-Driven Organizations” partially validated the impact of market-driven on business performance and brought up that most businesses have only a few superior capabilities that enable them to outperform the competition. As well as your competitors will eventually have to match or exceed these capabilities to meet their customers’ expectations of minimum acceptable performance. Many companies believe they are doing the necessary upfront work – but in reality and each business level that’s not always so.
So how do we do better with less? The main purpose of the Business Intelligence (BI) system is to provide knowledge workers with tools and methodologies that allow decision-makers to make effective and timely decisions, value added to information. The information sources can be spreadsheets, specialist applications packages such as ERP, CRM, BPM (Business Performance Management), KPIs, survey and internet.
Taking an example that how companies target to their customers. Target’s department store figured out a high school girl’s pregnancy before her father did. They delivered a pregnancy & child care product coupon to girl’s home; and father received the coupon and complained to the store manager. Of course, the manager apologized. After awhile it turns out father owes an apology to the department store (read –> full story).
This story tells us the importance of accurate, new and real-time data, organizations should acknowledge the value of creating the marketing information systems, experiments and focus groups (by age, gender, occupation etc). From the perspective of developing that an efficient marketing strategy, BI provides better insight into and according to literature review that hidden and unavailable data regarding customers, their impact on business and customer behavior. It also offers an opportunity for businesses to create an image, offer information about products and services, develop relationships with profitable customers, better understand the customer service practices, ensure continuous service improvements with respect to customers’ needs, etc.
Would you agree with the Business Intelligence is important as it is?